Where Poets Are on a Roll

By MINDY ALOFF

Published: October 21, 1994

POETS need New York: it's a first-rate graduate school for moral indignation. Federico Garcia-Lorca provides a classic example. In 1929, Lorca sailed here from his native Spain, where, at 31, he was already acclaimed as a master. His declared purpose in traveling was to study English at Columbia; his deeper purpose was to get away from home, which he was finding too lovely for words. (New York is "a dreadful place, and that's why I'm going," he wrote in anticipation of the city he knew about chiefly through novels and films.)

New York, then entering the harshest stages of the Depression, proved to be as wonderfully dreadful as Lorca had hoped. Once he settled into his dorm room, he left it. For several months, he boned up on Manhattan from Harlem to the Battery, meeting (and charming) Manhattanites along the way. As Ian Gibson's biography relates the story of his trip, he seems to have had a pretty good time.

Maybe too good a time. For Lorca's poems about the city are ferocious: bloody, bitter, apocalyptically judgmental. Some 65 years later, they could have been written yesterday. His "Ode to Walt Whitman," in Ben Belitt's translation, reads:

Ah, filthy New York,

New York of cables and death.

What angel do you carry, concealed in your cheek?

Genius: what can you do with it? How about sending it to Coney Island on a bus? That's what the Metropolitan Transit Authority is doing. In the last two years, the M.T.A.'s public-art program "Poetry in Motion" has stocked the subways and buses with poems by some of the most accomplished and intractably indirect stylists in print, including Lorca. Last fall, the organizers took one of his early love poems, "Variations," copied it onto posters (in both the original Spanish and the English of the Lysander Kemp translation), and had the posters placed in every one of the M.T.A.'s 5,900 trains and 3,700 buses. At a stroke, the poet's most intimate voice was bestowed on a captive population of millions. "What angel do you carry, concealed in your cheek?" Lorca had taunted New York. New York turned the other cheek. Using Lorca's own words, it replied:

The still waters of your mouth

Under a thicket of kisses.

Poetry on public transit is not a new idea. Cities in Europe have been realizing it since the 1980's; "Poetry in Motion" was sparked by London's "Poems on the Underground." Street Fare Journal, based in San Francisco, began to put poems on buses there in 1984. Since that time, its posters have been distributed to transit systems of some 20 cities, including New York, where they appear on the buses exclusively.

Nevertheless, New York's program has captured the attention of both the public and the press. The poems have been superior, and some could even be called highbrow. The posters have been eye-catching and allusive. (The sparkling "Poetry in Motion" logo, designed by John Wyatt, marries references to ancient mosaic techniques with references to the ceramic tile work inspired by them that one finds in the subways.)

One more thing: the placement of fine poetry in the New York subway, in particular, is so incongruous with received notions about the system that only madmen or poets would have thought of it. Indeed, "Poetry in Motion" has merited the dubious honor of inclusion in "Ripley's Believe It or Not!," where its mention was nestled among accounts of a woman who walked across the Australian desert and of a man who made sculptures out of matchboxes, then set them aflame. Imagery Underground

In fact, this incongruity is fundamental to the program's existence. "Poetry in Motion" is part of a larger campaign that the M.T.A. has been waging since the mid-80's to improve the subway's historically dismal image. For much of this century, the New York subway, of all the world's subways, has provided writers and film makers (as well as a few straphangers) with a handy emblem of a descent into hell. Well before Tom Wolfe observed in "The Bonfire of the Vanities" that "the D train to the Bronx was not a reader's train," Hart Crane and John Dos Passos had gone into the dark night of the IRT and emerged with indelible word-pictures of Stygian chaos and gloom.

These days, the fact that riders of the D train are being asked to contemplate lines by Emily Dickinson and Sir Walter Raleigh has generated international news, prompting submissions to "Poetry in Motion" from as far away as Africa. The prospect that a child of the Sega generation or a recent immigrant struggling to learn the local language might be snagged by a passage from Robert Frost or Langston Hughes -- might be led into the pure pleasures of English itself -- holds incalculable magic.

When a bemused reporter on the television program "48 Hours" beaches up on Elizabeth Bishop's miniature "Casabianca" during a story on new creature comforts in the subway system, and a train supervisor reads a few lines aloud to him as the camera focuses on the complete 10 lines of the poem, we're beyond magic and into miracle. "Casabianca" is a mesmerizing poem; it is also teasingly elusive on a literal level. It opens:

Love's the boy stood on the burning deck

Trying to recite "The boy stood on

The burning deck."

In fact, it almost wasn't included in the poetry program; some consultants at the M.T.A. objected that they couldn't make head or tail of it. "Casabianca" on "48 Hours": believe it, or not.